Four years ago, we launched Clearstory with a mission to create financial transparency between commercial construction companies with our first-of-its-kind Change Order Communication and Workflow platform. Since inception, we have helped contractors efficiently process and eliminate surprise costs on over $2.2 billion in Change Orders and T&M Tickets.
Today we are excited to announce our $7 million Series A round of funding led by Cloud Apps Capital Partners, joined by the construction tech veterans at Building Ventures, and follow-on investment from Jackson Square Ventures who led our Seed round last year. Raising a round in the current challenging investment environment further validates both our traction and our commitment to help all construction industry stakeholders get change orders processed and closed faster, dramatically reduce risk, improve efficiency and increase transparency.
We’re proud of the investors who have joined in this round and believe in our vision of becoming the universal platform for tracking and communicating Change Orders, and beyond. Along with the investment, we welcome Andy Stinnes, General Partner at Cloud Apps Capital Partners, and Jesse Devitte, co-founder and General Partner at Building Ventures, to our board.
Andy Stinnes, who led the investment round, has seen this network model first hand stating, “Clearstory has an exceptional opportunity to emerge as an industry utility in global construction, connecting all the players as the backbone for modern, mobile collaboration to unlock over $20 billion in shared value. We have personally seen this very model play out in both the supply chain and B2B payments markets and know how incredibly valuable and irreplaceable such Industry Utility SaaS companies will become.”
Allen Preger, Building Ventures Partner and construction technology veteran, understands the issue and opportunity after years solving construction workflows as Co-founder at Newforma. “Change orders can make or break a project and put at risk the trust between contractors, owners, designers, and subs. Clearstory promotes a collaborative versus combative approach to change management; and has demonstrated it can sell and deliver tangible value to each stakeholder in the process. We’re excited to back Cameron and the Clearstory team, and we can’t wait to see where they take it from here.”
There are many technology trends shaping the future of construction. 3D design has led to a faster, more iterative approach to project delivery, resulting in more changes at an accelerated pace. Because of this shift, our industry is at its breaking point with the current tools available- paper, spreadsheets, email and siloed financial software suites - to create and share T&M Tickets and Change Order Requests (COR).
Astonishingly, this age-old process accounts for roughly 15%, or $150 billion, of the $1 trillion U.S commercial construction industry revenues. And roughly 99% of construction companies still track field-directed extra work on carbon copy paper T&M Tags, which are physically transported from the field to the office, where they’re scanned and manually priced out as an associated COR. With Clearstory's tools, specialty contractors can complete this process in less than two minutes—dramatically reducing waste, eliminating at-risk revenue and, best of all, reporting costs in real time to their General Contractor.
With deep industry experience, the Clearstory team has seen firsthand how the lack of cost visibility can cause financial risk, broken relationships, and unnecessary stress for project team members.
Regardless of what financial software a Specialty Contractor, General Contractor or Owner is using internally, Clearstory keeps everyone on the same page in real-time. Using our cloud-based COR log, Subcontractors can send CORs and have them instantly appear in their General Contractor’s account. Contractors now have a shared source of truth to ensure their internal forecasts align with their project partners.
Over the past year, we have more than doubled our paying customers and are proud to have built a platform that supports construction companies of all sizes and across every single trade vertical including industry leaders like; BrandSafway (scaffolding), Conco (concrete), Performance Contracting Group (drywall), Permasteelisa (glass and glazing), NOVO (general contracting) and BuildGroup (general contracting).
We have an exciting product roadmap that includes more integrations to the industry's most common project management and accounting systems like Procore, CMiC and Sage, which seamlessly sync CORs and T&M Tags into all stakeholders systems-of-record. We are also actively iterating on feedback from our industry leading customers to build a powerful reporting and analytics engine that harnesses the data our customers are collecting about their projects.
If you’re a commercial contractor and want to increase efficiency and transparency in the industry, please reach out to us to schedule a demo with our team.
